Quotes by Johann Georg Hamann

About Johann Georg Hamann:

Johann Georg Hamann was a German philosopher, whose work was used by his student J. G. Herder as a main support of the Sturm und Drang movement, and associated by historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin with the Counter-Enlightenment. However, recent scholarship such as that by theologian Oswald Bayer places Hamann into a more nebulous category of theologian and philologist, less the proto-Romantic that Herder presented and more a premodern-postmodern thinker who brought the consequences of Lutheran theology to bear upon the burgeoning Enlightenment and especially in reaction to Kant. Goethe and Kierkegaard were among those who considered him to be the finest mind of his time.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The farther reason looks the greater is the haze in which it loses itself.

Johann Georg Hamann

Indeed, if a chief question does remain: how is the power to think possible? - The power to think right and left, before and without, with and above experience? then it does not take a deduction to prove the genealogical priority of language.

Johann Georg Hamann

Thus the public use of reason and freedom is nothing but a dessert, a sumptuous dessert.

Johann Georg Hamann

What good to me is the festive garment of freedom when I am in a slave's smock at home?

Johann Georg Hamann

Everything the human being heard from the beginning, saw with its eyes, looked upon and touched with its hands was a living word; for God was the word.

Johann Georg Hamann

A writer who is in a hurry to be understood today or tomorrow runs the danger of being misunderstood the day after tomorrow.

Johann Georg Hamann

Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it.

Johann Georg Hamann

Everything is vain and tortures the spirit instead of calming and satisfying it.

Johann Georg Hamann

Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves.

Johann Georg Hamann

If only I was as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would have to do no more than repeat a single word three times.

Johann Georg Hamann

Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.

Johann Georg Hamann

Our reason arises, at the very least, from this twofold lesson of sensuous revelations and human testimonies.

Johann Georg Hamann

The weakness of ourselves and of our reason makes us see flaws in beauties by making us consider everything piece by piece.

Johann Georg Hamann

The product of paper and printed ink, that we commonly call the book, is one of the great visible mediators between spirit and time, and, reflecting zeitgeist, lasts as long as ore and stone.

Johann Georg Hamann

Every phenomenon of nature was a word, - the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas.

Johann Georg Hamann

Nature is a book, a letter, a fairy tale (in the philosophical sense) or whatever you want to call it.

Johann Georg Hamann

Physics is nothing but the ABC's. Nature is an equation with an unknown, a Hebrew word which is written only with consonants to which reason has to add the dots.

Johann Georg Hamann

The thirst for vengeance was the beautiful nature which Homer imitated.

Johann Georg Hamann

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.

Johann Georg Hamann

All human wisdom works and has worries and grief as reward.

Johann Georg Hamann

Author Bio

  • NameJohann Georg Hamann
  • DescriptionGerman philosopher
  • BornAugust 27, 1730
  • DiedJune 21, 1788
  • CountryGermany
  • ProfessionPhilosopher; Writer